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COMPLIT

COMPLIT 10N:Shakespeare and Performance in a Global Context

Preference to freshmen. The problem of performance including the performance of gender through the plays of Shakespeare. In-class performances by students of scenes from plays. The history of theatrical performance. Sources include filmed versions of plays, and readings on the history of gender, gender performance, and transvestite theater.

Censorship, Borges tells us, is the mother of metaphors. The Islamic regime in Iran censors all aethetic production in the country. But Iranian dissident artists, from film-makers and fiction writers to composers in a thriving under-ground musical scene, have cleverly found ways to fight these draconian measures. They have developed an impressive body of work that is as sophisticated in style as it is rich in its discourse of democracy and dissent. The purpose of the seminar is to understand the aesthetic tropes of dissent in Iran, and the social and theological roots of rules of censorship. Masterpieces of post-revolutionary film, fiction, and music will be discussed in the context of tumultuous history of dissent in Islamic Iran.

COMPLIT 41N:Borderlands of Literature and Culture

Rather than try to examine the whole of such an extensive body of work by artists of Mexican descent living in Mexico and the United States, the focus will be on the transnational themes of border thinking, memory, and identity (both personal and collective). Looking at the foundational poetry, auto-ethnographies, and narratives by Américo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldúa and how their literary and ethnographic work laid the groundwork for subsequent imaginings in the narratives, poetry, and theory of border thinking and writing. We will explore the trans-frontier cultural conditions under which imaginative literary texts are produced, disseminated, and received. We will consider not only the historical transnational experiences that inform these borderlands texts but the potential futures of Mexico and the United States they imagine.

COMPLIT 49:"Global Literature": Reading New Worlds

It is a given that today's world is increasingly "networked": we are connected to a wider spectrum of people and places than ever before, in multiple ways. Our economic, political, technological, financial, cultural, ecological worlds seem blended into one. And yet amidst all that we seem to have in common, we also have sometimes very different ways of understanding those connections, both as individuals and as members of different national communities. In this course, we will learn how great works of literature help us not only imagine those connections between people and between nations as they have been produced historically and as they exist today, but also to see how literature helps us imagine the future. We will read novels from various locales, explore the cultures and histories from which they emerged, and link them together in a conversation. Works include: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide; Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah; Ondatjee, The English Patient; Ibrahim Al-Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone.

COMPLIT 51N:Comparative Fictions of Ethnicity (AMSTUD 51N, CSRE 51N)

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"? Satisfies
PWR2.

COMPLIT 101:What is Comparative Literature?

How critics and authors from different eras and different parts of the globe have considered how literature, as a traditional cultural form, can or cannot, help to sustain societies faced with concrete historical crises such as war, revolution, and colonization. How the aesthetic work of verbal art has been seen to offer the possibility of continuity in the face of change. What, if anything, can be continued? How does art perhaps aid in accommodating change?

This class will address major works by Franz Kafka and consider Kafka as a modernist writer whose work reflects on modernity. We will also examine the role of Kafka's themes and poetics in the work of contemporary writers. (Meets Writing-in-the-Major requirement)

COMPLIT 112:Oscar Wilde and the French Decadents (COMPLIT 312, FRENCH 112, FRENCH 312)

Close reading of Oscar Wilde's work together with major texts and authors of 19th-century French Decadence, including Symbolism, l'art pour l'art, and early Modernism. Points of contact between Wilde and avant-garde Paris salons; provocative, creative intersections between (homo)erotic and aesthetic styles, transgression; literary and cultural developments from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, Huysmans, Flaubert, Rachilde, Lorrain, and Proust compared with Wilde¿s Salomé, Picture of Dorian Gray, and critical writings; relevant historical and philosophical contexts. All readings in English; all student levels welcome.